2 metre pliosaur skull retrieved from Jurassic coast

The skull of an enormous sea monster called a pliosaur has been extracted from the cliffs of the Jurassic Coast in Southern England. The marine reptile would have ruled the waves 150 million years ago and its 2 metre skull is one of the most complete specimens of its type ever discovered. It’s so special that it will feature in a David Attenborough programme on BBC One on New Year's Day...

Steve - This would look very similar to a crocodile skull, but it's much, much larger. And of course the rest of it was up in the cliff and that's where it fell from. So we got a drone and droned the whole cliff to find out where it'd fallen from. We located it after looking at the film footage. Basically, we had to get a climbing frame in to help us to get down to it because it was in the middle of a very steep, sheer cliff. When I finally got down to it we realised the animal, when it finally settled on the seafloor, it was upside down. From that, the next stage was to actually work out a plan to excavate in the cliff, form a big cave, a massive great cave above it, down on it, and then clear it off and strengthen it and really extract it. We did that with a very well designed cage in the skid system. Then, laterally, it then came to my workshop for me to clean it and put it all back together.

Chris - Did it come out, as they say in the trade, 'on block?' It was still encased in big lumps of stone and you had to chip that away to reveal what was the real fossil inside the extraneous rock?

Steve - So it came out naturally. It was still covered in what we call mudstone and you could see part of the bone, but a lot of the bones had broken and it was in a huge block that weighed we think just over a ton. There's lots and lots of cavities in the skull where the eyes were, where the muscles were, so that had to be cleaned right out. Philip found the initial discovery in April, it took from April to August to get it out of the cliff and back into safety. It came into the museum a couple of months later and it probably took another six or nine months to get it back ready for display.

Chris - The clean specimen, how big is that skull?

Steve - It's nearly two metres long. On the side of it, the back of the skull, you could extend your arms and it would be about that wide.

Chris - Goodness, that's a big head, isn't it? If you extrapolate from that head to the whole creature, what would the rest of it have looked like and how big would the rest of it have been?

Steve - We think it would be 9 to 10 metres, have four big flippers exactly like you see a turtle's got, and those would probably be about two metres long each, four of those, very short neck, and a barrel shaped body. So it's rather like, if anyone knows what the Loch Ness monster looks like, on that basis, it's very similar to that big fat body. It's a top of the food chain predator. In other words, this was the apex predator in the Kimmeridgian seas. There's nothing bigger. When it took food, it took anything. It ate its own kind, and they would've fed on Ichthyosaurs and anything that smaller than themselves, they would've fed on.

Chris - So, in answer to the question, 'What did it eat,' you would say, 'Anything it wanted to?'

Steve - Anything it wanted to. Now a lot of people think they're just scavengers but we've got evidence, in some of the bones, where they've got big bite marks. One side of the bone, we deduce it's still attached to the body, otherwise the teeth would bite both sides or you get bite marks over the side of the bone - that indicates it was still on the body while it was being ripped apart. They would probably be down in the dark depths of the water and come up and just take prey in a very quick movement.

Chris - Is the rest of it still in the cliff, then?

Steve - When we excavated around it, there were more and more bones going back into the cliff and we've got a scap, in other words, a breastbone of it as well. We know there's a lot more there and with the preservation that we've got on the skull, there's no reason to suppose the whole body's not there. Logistically, it's a very difficult thing to get out because it's about 15 metres down. That would indicate we couldn't tunnel in anymore, we would have to remove the whole of that 15 metres cliff and then expose it and then collect it and put the rock back and reinstate the cliff.

Chris - There's going to be hundreds of tons of rock, isn't there? Is there not a danger that, nature being what it is on that coastline, there could be a fall and this could be lost?

Steve - No, the erosion is quite rapid, but we don't get big land slips or anything like that here. It's more by wet/dry desiccation: there's bits falling off all the time, but it's not massive great slips. It will take a number of years, probably about 20 years, to go way back. The erosion is quite quick, but not that quick.

Chris - Can you get inside the skull and see what the brain structure would have been and that kind of thing in those cavities?

Steve - That's the really good thing about this. The whole skull, every element's there and where you excavate the back of it, you can see the brain case, you can see where everything that you need to see is. The only thing is you can't see the underside or the palate, the roof of the mouth, because that's on the base if you get what I mean.

Chris - It's absolutely extraordinary isn't it? So what did Sir David Attenborough make of it when he had a glimpse?

Steve - I think he was very impressed when he looked at it. We looked initially at the snout, because we CT scanned that to look inside it where you've got all these pits in there that indicate it's sensing pressure, and it's one of those things that you see - crocodiles have got the same things but they're really well developed in this pliosaur, they're all over the front of the snake, all these pits that are joined by a channel that go back into the brain. When something swims through, they leave an electrical discharge. It may be that that they could pick up on but, again, that's still quite new. People are still arguing over what these represent and what they really do. The thing is with this skull, it's so good that because it's very large, we would like to have CT scanned it, the whole thing, but there's no CT scanner in Britain that's big enough to do this.

Chris - And of course anyone who's intrigued by what you've been saying can catch you prime time on the BBC on New Year's Day.

Steve - Yep, that's right. Eight o'clock BBC One I think it is. The film shows the extraction which is quite a difficult thing to do. I don't think anyone in their right mind would probably look at doing it, but we didn't want to lose this because we realise its significance and its scientific importance.